A prime example of spontaneous cooperation was the extraordinarily successful evacuation of Lower Manhattan during the September 11 attacks. James M. Kendra, an assistant professor of emergency administration and planning at the University of North Texas, estimates that nearly half a million people fled Manhattan on boats — and he emphasizes that the waterborne evacuation was a self-organized volunteer process that could probably never have been planned on a government official’s clipboard.

At 59 Impasse Eddy on Monday, three women behind a blue house stirred a pot of beans and rice, flavored with coconut, spices and lime juice.They started cooking for their neighbors the day after the earthquake. On many mornings, they serve 100 people before 10 a.m.

“Everyone pays a small amount, 15 gourd,” or a little less than 50 cents, said Guerline Dorleen, 30, sitting on a small chair near the bubbling pot. “Before, this kind of meal would cost 50.”

Smiling and proud, the women said they did not have the luxury of waiting for aid groups to reach them in their hilly neighborhood. The trouble was, they were running out of food. They used their last bit of rice and beans on Monday.

However, there is a more negative side to the response to disasters in which authorities, fearful of disorder, take a command and control approach that at best stops people from helping themselves and at worst ends up with massacres of civilians. What disaster sociologists, like Lee Clarke call the panic myth (pdf) – that people will run wild in the absence of authority – is the opposite of what is found in disasters, rather there is sometimes “elite panic”, when after a disaster the powerful imagine that the public is a source of danger, and then elites begin protecting property and stop people from acting to help themselves.This reponse was vividly demonstrated in the incompetent and inhumane response to Hurricane Katrina (e.g. The bridge to Gretna and Zeitoun).